


Undertow

by Measured_Words



Category: Behind You (Webcomic)
Genre: Behind You 040: Man Made Lake, Gen, Lakes, Water, Worldbuilding, or maybe the opposite of that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:08:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21725782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Measured_Words/pseuds/Measured_Words
Summary: What lies beneath the surface, and what does it want?
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Undertow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [farevenasdecidedtouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/gifts).



There are many drowned places in the world. Most of the earth has been underwater at one point or another, mostly from natural changes. Sometimes nature gets helped along by environmental impacts, like rising water levels from climate change. Sometimes changes are more deliberate, in the name of progress. Water is power. People need both. 

Inundation leads to displacement and abandonment, and always has. This process has left many sunken places rediscover, many whose secrets we will never fully understand, like Sea Henge. Some are the result of sudden catastrophes, like Port Royal, Jamaica. An earthquake in 1692 and the ensuing tsunami washed a significant portion of the port town into the sea. Not all disasters are natural, though: much more recently, in 1982, the World Bank helped fund the building of the Chixoy Dam in Guatemala. Thousands of Indigenous people were displaced and hundreds were massacred when they refused to relocate. More than just lives are lost to these kinds of changes, whatever their origin or motivations. Whole ways of living in the world, let alone basic livelihoods, can be erased with a landscape. These are just facts - hard knowable truths about lost legacies, and what lies beneath even the gentlest looking waters.

Traumatic losses can leave scars on the psyches of survivors, but what else? Can anything more than horror stories and glimpses of sunken structures mark these places of loss? Can the land itself remember? Does it carry in it echoes of its pasts, like the sunken city of Dunwich whose tolling bells can, allegedly, still be heard? And what of the water? Does it know its power? Remember that it is the source of all known life? Does it crow in triumph to reclaim its old territory? Resent being trapped into valleys and harnessed for our insatiable drive to find new sources of energy?

The Great Lakes are among the largest freshwater lakes in the world. Back before they were as we know them now, at the end of the last ice age, they went through several major changes. Glacial Lake Algonquian contained all of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, and it spilled past their beaches. People lived, died, and were buried on rises overlooking this vast inland sea, and their graves now overlook dry earth. In some cases, what used to be above the lakes are now submerged beneath them, instead, their secrets buried under sediments, or washed entirely from their place of rest and destroyed. Does the land remember its past lives? What if we remind it?

Imagine a town - a small one, say, or a strange one. Or maybe just one that’s in the wrong place. Something happens. Maybe it’s slow and takes a long time, like the gradual melting of a glacier. Maybe it’s sudden and swift, like a landslide reshaping the course of a river. Or maybe it’s something more deliberate. Imagine people with the hubris to believe that they understand, or can control the power of water. Imagine that the strength of their desire for power is strong enough to overcome _any_ obstacle. It could even be a real need, or at least a perceived one. Whatever the scenario, one little town can’t stand in the way of such forces. In this case lets say that the structures are not relocated, but maybe the people are; most of them. Survivors start over, not too far away, but remember the old town. 

These places might never quite leave the mental landscape of the region, but adjustments are made. Remembrances shift. In 2002, a Mexican church that had been submerged beneath a reservoir for almost 40 years, and abandoned centuries before that, was exposed due to a drought reducing water levels in the region. It was dry enough for people to visit the grounds on foot, to feast and marvel at what had been revealed. 40 years is more than a generation, but still in living memory. Two hundred years is much longer - did they remember that it had fallen into disuse because its patrons were ravaged by plague? Was that to be celebrated?

How - and how long - is the old town remembered? That may depend on what it has to offer in its new incarnation. Sometimes new bodies of water spawn life and other resources - a place of rest for migrating waterfowl, a new spawning ground for frogs and fish, a watering hole for wildlife of all kinds, or inviting beaches for relaxing humans. Sometimes they’re poisonous and threatening, like tailing ponds from mining operations. Even the gentlest of lakes can host dangerous parasites, like the flatworms that cause schistosomiasis, or larvae from mosquitoes carrying malaria or even, in warmer waters, lethal microbes like Naegleria fowleri, the brain-eating amoeba. Some of the most beautiful lakes are the most toxic, their instagrammable waters filled with acidic industrial runoff.

In the old town’s early days, it might take time for it to develop an ecosystem of its own, for good or for ill, and it may not meet expectations based on other local environments. If there’s fewer fish and worse hunting than elsewhere, if the water isn’t potable, it can reinforce associations with misfortune. Is that a curse? The old own is already a place of tragedy and loss. A place of power. And so the old town is carried into the memories of the land, its stories as muddled as the waters of the lake, carried down the generations. Its is remembered.

And, perhaps, it is a place that also remembers. What is a generation to the veins of the earth coursing across its surface, now a sea, now a frozen mountain, now a river. A lake. And carried within, a town that misses its people, drowned in waters that have caressed the bones of its dead, tasted bloodlines who still venture on pilgrimages here, to the old town. Even if they know better. Even if this is no longer their world, no longer their place. Their memories belong together. The water remembers. It has not forgotten its power, or who and what belongs to it. A current that seems too swift to pull against. A sudden gust of wind. An unexpected sand bank or rocky outcrop. A strand of water grass that catches on a keel, or an oar, or a limb. These are the water embodying its power, and calling out to lost generations for reunion.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide! I hope this works for you as well as it did in my head :x
> 
> If you would like Water Fact Receipts, let me know and I can provide!


End file.
